worried about unconsious copying

Hi,

I am new to composing and whenever I create a good melody, I feel like I might have heard it before.

Does anyone else have this problem, and if so, how do you deal with it?

Thanks,

Micah

I am new to composing and whenever I create a good melody, I feel like I might have heard it before.

You probably have...or at least something like it. There's only so many combinations of these 12 notes available...odds are, some fragment of anything you write, will be similar to some fragment of something someone else writes.

Get over it...

;)

Your treatment and devlopment of said melody should set it apart.

Thank you so much! That really helps.

...There's only so many combinations of these 12 notes available...

to be exact, there is precisely 479,001,600 combinations of notes

but anyway, like robin said, you probably have heard a little snippet of your music somewhere, it's just a matter of making that your own snippet of music, and forming it into a great piece.

to be exact, there is precisely 479,001,600 combinations of notes

That only applies for creating a 12-tone row, i.e. a set of notes where each of the 12 pitches appears exactly one time. (Well, technically we must exclude transpositions for 12-tone rows, so it's just 11!). Most "melodies" aren't 12 tone rows, so the number of combinations for an arbitrarily long melody tends to infinity. :P

I am very much of the belief that it doesn't matter what your material is, but what you do with what you have. Not to say that you shouldn't try to get good material to work with, but if a sculptor decides to make a sculpture out of gold, that does not make it any more likely to be more beautiful than another sculpture made out of rock - it depends entirely on what the sculptors do with their materials that matters.

great musicians borrow licks all the time from each other, it's just how the game is played.

If you put all possible permutations of 12 pitches AND 12 durations then you're pretty much fucked for all life! (plus you'll be getting one good melody every 69,000,000,000 permutations you make).

hehe...

I agree with the above posts, but would also like to add that as well as the combination of notes available, you also have mood, dynamics, phrasing, tempo, etc. to consider, which can change your piece dramatically!

look , i like copying

yaya.. but i dont copying for now

i like create for now

dark@@